Amando de Miguel says that Zapatero is Spain’s worst ever ruler, with the possible exception of Fernando VII, Witiza and someone else. Wittiza was very naughty and nasty indeed–he “taught all Spain to sin“–and, to crown it all, he invited the Moors into Spain to help him fight Wodewic. Maybe there’s a Visigoth somewhere who’d…
Someone’s passed along a story by La Vanguardia’s plagiarist-in-chief which apparently bears ridiculously strong resemblances to a Guardian story from last year. Thanks, but yawn.
Not much doing this year. Here, nevertheless, oneself and the local deity, with thanks to C&P. There are some good and affordable wines to be had in the Manchuela, the pocket-plain extending between the rivers Júcar and Cabriel (hence “the Manchegan Mesopotamia“, with Villatoya presumably corresponding to Baghdad) and tucked away between Cuenca and Albacete.
“Narcisista-leninista” is what Andrés Oppenheimer calls our dear friend Hugo Chávez. I’d better call Ken Livingstone one too–he hates being left out of this kind of thing. (PS: Chávez’s shrink, Edmundo Chirinos, says the paramilitary pres isn’t clinically unstable. Second opinion?)
Amando de Miguel’s made a collection here. The Central Americans perform well as always, with their Supermen, Stalins, Ceaucescus and Roonies, but my fave’s the army recruit called Felicísimo Lindo Condón, Really Happy Pretty Condom.
I’ve just read chunks of White on Black by Ruben Gallego (available in Spanish as Blanco sobre negro), an extraordinary collection of glimpses of a childhood spent struggling with cerebral palsy in Soviet institutions. The author was dumped there, aged 1, by his maternal grandfather, Ignacio Gallego, secretary-general of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), who…
Here‘s a good bunch of Pontevedra photos by Colin Davies chronicling the frenzied destruction of those not-particularly-interesting buildings that nevertheless make Spain look the way it looks. If your dwelling is in a pre-1850 zone, then the chance is that things will stay more or less the way they are, but most everything from the…